In general, project management is understood to include planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling resources to achieve specific goals. In the construction industry, for example, construction management firms may be engaged in medium and large projects (e.g., sport stadiums, hospitals and healthcare facilities, office buildings, power plants, manufacturing facilities, airports, seaports and railway terminals, subway systems, multi-unit residential complexes, etc.). Throughout the entire process of construction (e.g., from planning to handover), large teams of construction professionals and specialists have to be managed so as to ensure that all aspects of the construction project (e.g., partnering, estimating, purchasing, scheduling, engineering, safety, community relations, etc.) go smoothly to produce high-quality projects on time.
Conventionally, coordinating such large teams involved a lot of paperwork, including documentation related to data in the field. This is especially true in performing field management, punch list management, quality, commissioning, turn-over and safety management, and warranty- and maintenance-related functions. Such documents include, but are not limited to, field inspections, punch lists, vendor lists, resource lists, completion lists, and task lists. Consequently, firms have sought processes that keep their project coordinators and subcontractors on the job site working (i.e., building and maintaining), rather than in an office shuffling papers. Furthermore, the use of documentation may slow down productivity simply due to the fact that not all of the field personnel may have access to the recorded field data, thus possibly leading to work duplication, unnecessary communications, or other cost-increasing problems.
For example, in the construction industry, personnel may spend a significant amount of time documenting existing or potential problems, non-compliances, discrepancies, variances or other issues that arise while carrying out certain project management processes (e.g., field inspection, quality control, commissioning, etc.). The documented issues are addressed and resolved before the project is completed and turned over to the owner or client. Generally, issues must be documented in detail so as to ensure that they are correctly resolved on a first attempt. Multiple attempts of correcting an issue (also referred to herein as “rework”) can cost valuable time and money, possibly up to 20% or more of a project's contract amount. A well-documented issue may contain a variety of informative details, including, but not limited to, a defined location or area in which the issue was found, an annotated project rendering (e.g., drawing) providing more detail about the issue's location, a clear description of what the issue is (e.g., in the form of notes), an identified responsible party tasked with resolving the issue, and additional details providing clarity to the issue.
Creating and documenting an issue with a sufficient amount of detail is time- and resource-intensive, which ultimately leads to personnel providing incomplete documentation, thus increasing the likelihood that the issue will not be fixed properly or in a timely manner. Furthermore, the primary and most popular method involves judicious use of clipboards, pens, and paper to document issues in conjunction with painter's tape physically marking the location of the issues in the real world. Spreadsheets of punch list items may then be created and sorted between responsible parties. Distributing this information to the responsible parties who need to resolve the issue is often manually handled. In some instances, spreadsheets may be emailed to different team members, making it difficult to track the issue, as well as the status of the issue (e.g., whether the issue is resolved, in process, or waiting to be processed). In turn, current methods do not provide a comprehensive audit trail of when the issue was communicated to the responsible party, the current status of the issue, and whether the resolution time (time in which the issue was resolved) is acceptable. As such, current methods of creating issues and managing resolution of such issues are inefficient, thereby resulting in increased costs, time delays, as well as potential risks of injury in the event that certain issues are not resolved in a timely manner.